Weekly Intel - 2026-03-08

Two themes running through everything this week: the gap between what AI promises and what it actually delivers, and infrastructure that turns out to be more fragile than anyone assumed.

Economy & Labor

US economy unexpectedly sheds 92k jobs in February . The labor market just surprised everyone. Employers cut 92,000 jobs in February, with federal government employment dropping by 10,000 positions. This is a sharp reversal from recent growth trends. One month doesn’t make a recession, but if you’re planning headcount or budgets for Q2, this number should be in the room.

Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence . Anthropic’s researchers built a new way to measure AI’s actual impact on jobs: not what AI could theoretically do, but what it’s actually doing. The finding that matters: AI-exposed jobs tend to be higher-skilled, better-paid positions held by older, educated women. No significant unemployment spike yet in those roles, but hiring of younger workers in affected fields has slowed. If you manage teams, that second part is the one to watch. The disruption won’t show up as layoffs first. It’ll show up as roles that just stop getting filled.

AI & Software

When AI writes the software, who verifies it? Microsoft and Google report 25-30% of their new code is AI-generated. Predictions say 95% by 2030. Anthropic built a C compiler in two weeks. Here’s the problem nobody is solving fast enough: as AI writes more code and humans review less of it, who’s actually verifying that the software works and is secure? This is the question I keep coming back to in my own work. The speed is real. The quality assurance isn’t keeping up.

AI Industry Moves

Jensen Huang says Nvidia is pulling back from OpenAI and Anthropic . Nvidia is ending its investments in both OpenAI and Anthropic ahead of their expected IPOs. Huang’s explanation is that Nvidia wants to stay focused on being a supplier, not a stakeholder. Maybe. But exiting right before both companies go public, when most investors would want to stay in, is a signal worth reading carefully.

Where things stand with the Department of Defense . The Department of Defense designated Anthropic as a supply chain risk to national security, specifically for direct DoD contracts. Anthropic disputes the legal basis and plans to challenge it in court.

Infrastructure

US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters . Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon signed a “Ratepayer Protection Pledge” committing to cover the cost of new electricity generation for their data centers. Translation: the energy consumption problem got bad enough that these companies had to publicly promise they wouldn’t stick consumers with the bill. That they felt the need to make this pledge tells you everything about where the backlash was heading.

AWS outage due to drone attacks in UAE . Drone attacks hit AWS data centers in the UAE, disrupting cloud services and extending to facilities in Bahrain. This is new territory. We’ve planned for earthquakes, power failures, and software bugs. Physical attacks on cloud infrastructure using drones is a threat model that just became very real. If your disaster recovery plan assumes your cloud provider’s hardware is safe, it’s time to revisit that assumption.

Markets & Tech

The worst acquisition in history, again . Warner Bros. Discovery is selling to Paramount Skydance after eight failed bids in six months. Scott Galloway traces Warner’s merger history back to 1967 and shows that every single one has destroyed shareholder value. The pattern is almost impressive in its consistency.

MacBook Neo . Apple launched a $599 laptop with a 13-inch Liquid Retina display and A18 Pro chip. That’s Chromebook territory with Apple hardware. This is a great way for Apple to get more people into the Apple ecosystem at a price point that used to be off-limits. I’m unsure if this is a good thing for Apple…more people in the ecosystem at the risk of commoditizing the platform? Time will tell.

Science

Global warming has accelerated significantly . New research confirms temperatures have risen faster since 2015 than in any previous 10-year period since 1945, even after accounting for natural climate variations.

That’s what I’m watching. What caught your attention this week?

-Eric